Last year was really the first time I read any YA books as an adult, aside from the first Harry Potter book my dad bought me for Christmas twenty years ago. Maybe I’ve just had a string of bad luck. Maybe I’m too much of a literary fiction snob (GAC) to get the same kind of enjoyment out of YA. Or maybe Rainbow Rowell, and to a lesser degree, Becky Albertalli, spoiled me for everyone else since their books resonated so deeply with me. I hoped Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End might break my losing streak, considering he and Albertalli collaborated on a book last year, and while there were some things I really liked, it didn’t work for me overall.
Mateo and Rufus don’t know each other, but they have something in common: they’ve both received the call everyone dreads. Death Cast has let them know, just past midnight on the same night, that they both have one last day to live. One is friendless, and the other is separated from his friends due to his own violent mistake, but they find each other on an app called Last Friend that pairs people with a new friend to spend their last day with. Rufus challenges Mateo to take risks, and Mateo challenges Rufus to change the way he thinks about himself and others. Since Death Cast can’t tell them exactly how and when they’ll die, they don’t know if each minute will be their last, but they do know they want to help each other have the best possible last day.
At first glance, I thought the high-concept premise could be really interesting, but it started to bug me almost immediately after I started reading. I couldn’t get past all of the logical inconsistencies, and there were SO MANY. I couldn’t suspend disbelief. I just didn’t buy it. And that really bummed me out, because I loved the two main characters and enjoyed a lot of the individual scenes, especially when it was just Mateo and Rufus out on their own, living the last hours of their lives. It was a very frustrating read in the end, because I just couldn’t get over how much I hated the premise, and that’s the tricky thing with anything high-concept: if you don’t buy the concept, you’re screwed. Still, Silvera’s character work makes me want to try another of his books, but I’m nervous that the concept will overshadow the characters again. I guess I’ll find out when I read What If It’s Us?